Saturday, April 07, 2007

Nokia N95 - upload directly to Flickr

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Drobo - "storage robot"

One of the most awesome products I've seen in a while. From the user's perspective, it solves many of the practical hassles of using RAID. And furthermore, being able to boot from USB means you can build an entire new computer and not have to reinstall the OS and all your programs and settings again, which for me usually takes a whole day, plus the rest of the week to get it back to where I left off. link to demo video http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx

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Friday, April 06, 2007

Ads to Turn Casual Gaming into Major Revenue Stream

(from MarketingVox) Ads are changing the casual gaming world drastically, with in-game advertising for casual downloadable games producing a 200-500 percent revenue increase compared with ad-free "try and buy" games. Research firm Yankee Group estimates in-game ad revenues will reach $732 million by 2010, and the primary demographic audience, women over 30, holds 80 percent of decision-making buying power in the U.S. - making advertising in the medium all the more lucrative, according to Next-Gen guest writers Ran Cohen, director of emerging media at Eyeblaster, and Chris Houtzer, director of new media for games at RealNetworks. Ads can be integrated by adding logos into the game, but the real future is video ads, which can be integrated between levels of a game. RealNetworks and Eyeblaster are working together to create a video ad system. Video ads are presented every 10 minutes of play during natural breaks in the game. If a user decides to buy the game, the ads are immediately disabled.

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"What You See Is What You Get" concept phone

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Yanko Design publishes news of another wonderful concept phone, designed by Pei-Hua Huang, an Industrial Design graduate student of NC State University. The see-through concept phone makes picture taking more intuitive.

"What You See Is What You Get" is Huang's latest concept project. The purpose of this project is to look for farther possibilities of future cell phones. With the 50mm equivalent camera module, this cell phone no long depends on the screen while taking pictures. By using the transparent frame as viewfinder, "What You See Is What You Get."

[via Mobile Magazine]

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New Zealand peeps imitate plants to do solar on the cheap

Obviously, scientists didn't exactly originate the idea of harvesting energy from the sun when they started slapping together solar cells -- plants have been up on this whole photosynthesis mojo for a good long while. Now some researchers at Massey University in New Zealand have developed a range of synthetic dyes from organic compounds that closely mimic the light harvesting that goes on in nature. Other scientists have been pursuing similar solar techniques, but there's a major difficulty in getting the dyes to pass the energy on for actual use. After 10 years of research, the Massey scientists claim to have "the most efficient porphyrin dye in the world." Benefits of the dyes over traditional silicon-based solar panels include the ability to operate in low light, 10x cheaper production, and flexible application -- starting with canvassing roofs, walls and windows, but eventually moving on to wearable items that can charge your electronics stash. A working prototype for "real applications" should be ready in a couple years.

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